Ways of Being, and Ways of Knowing about Ways of Being
Dr Isis Brook
Introduction
This paper outlines the work of Ronald Barnett on the triad of knowing, doing, and being and then examines recent attempts at resurrecting an aspect of ‘being’ in education, through developments such as the attributes model that is currently taking hold in many universities. The current focus on being, attributes, and soft skills or emotional intelligence can be thought of as merely promoting employability skills or as facilitating transformatory personal development, which it has been argued (e.g., Jack Mezierow) is the true purpose of education. Whichever approach we take to this agenda of facilitating the development of a student’s ‘way of being’, at some point we need to know whether our institutions, our courses, our practice as educators, and the methods we use, have actually brought about what we hoped for. Thus we need ways of knowing about our students’ ways of being, whether that is to guide their progress, to assess their capabilities, or to be sure that our institutions are contributing something positive to the world.
Being
Ronald Barnett builds from the Heideggarian concept of Dasein, which he explains as “being in there” (2007a :28) to suggest the way a student is always “the student in some situation”. For example, they might be listening to a lecture but they are always themselves as well listening to the lecture – there is some inner self that is aware of itself doing these things. And, as he goes on to point out, no one else can know what is actually felt or understood by the student. From this awareness of the situation of the learner Barnett develops an education agenda that aims to allow for ‘being’ in educational processes. Why he believes this is so important is that it is, for him, the very core of what education is about. This is a resistance to an instrumentalising agenda, but Barnett also gives good instrumental reasons why it should be part of education. His line of argument here is that in an uncertain world it is the student’s capability, self-knowledge, self-confidence and self-reliance that will be necessary for them to flourish. He speaks of “durable capacities for flourishing” (Barnett 2007a: 63) and these come about through the student’s development of self.
For Barnett a good curriculum will involve three dimensions: knowing, acting and being. Knowledge we understand as necessary, and acting (the idea that we practice skills) is becoming recognised even in disciplines that previously did not see themselves as training skills. Being, Barnett claims, has slipped off the agenda of education and yet it is hugely important to learning and to concepts like ‘graduateness’.
An interesting exercise is to think to what extent ‘being’ features in your curriculum. It will vary according to discipline, but it needs to be there somewhere.
Being is not an extra add-on dimension of learning it is implicated in all areas of learning. Barnett sees knowing and acting as also having a personal dimension: knowing necessarily entails a personal knowing and the development of a relationship between the student and the field of study (Barnett and Coate, 2005:60), acting, though easily characterized in placement type work, also relates to inculcating the practices of a discipline, what they call “acquiring a deep grammar of the discipline” (Ibid. 62), being is the more direct inner development of capacities, that they claim, will lead to the student having durable and authentic capacities (Ibid. 64)
However, the being that the student develops has to be their own being not a performative one put on for the tutor. This means that in learning there has to be some kind of absolute internalization of the norms and expectations of education. As Barnett explains:
A genuine higher education puts students on the spot. It does not let them evade themselves. It not merely encourages the student to develop her own point of view, but requires the student to state her reasons for her point of view. The student is pressed relentlessly and, ultimately, the pressing is done by the student herself. She internalizes the interrogative voices. And in the process takes on her own voice. (Barnett, 2007a:54)
Thus in Barnett there is a strong idea of a change in the ‘way of being’ of the student and it is one that involves taking on for one’s self the criticality of higher education – it’s about holding things up to scrutiny including one’s own views, beliefs, behaviours and so on.
If we think in terms of education as transforming who we are through a process of self-scrutiny then we are certainly in the same territory as transformative learning as developed by Jack Mezirow. A core idea of his is that we are all using ‘frames of reference’ – ways in which we habitually see the world – and it is these frames of reference that need to be questioned (Mezirow 1996:3-34). For Mezirow there is a strong conception of education as bringing about more inclusive social contexts, of escaping destructive biases such as racism or sexism by questioning habits of mind that are drawn from accepted social norms in an unquestioning way. Mezirow has expanded his original work to now include six habits of mind that the student could be questioning: epistemic, sociolinguistic, psychological, moral/ethical, philosophical, aesthetic (Cranton, 2006:26). These are all interwoven and make up who we are, so questioning them is hard intellectual and emotional work. That hard work changes who we are and what we do, it changes our being, not just some measurable level of our knowledge acquisition. This might seem far beyond what the average UK university is aiming for or requiring of students, but I will show one way in which this is being attempted.
The attributes model as a vehicle for being
Being can be seen as coming back into education though the concept of attributes. There are many institutions that use an Attributes Model to address the being that is missing from the curriculum.
In this discourse an attribute is generally understood to be deeper than a skill in the sense that the student develops a propensity for it, as opposed to an ability to demonstrate it when asked to do so. The student becomes the ‘kind of person who …’ with the institution filling in the blanks. There is, in fact, a lot of commonality between the attributes institutions list as demonstrating graduateness. Looking at a range of institutions it is clear that they normally include scholarly, employability related, personal, and citizenship attributes, but the balance between these and the overall emphasis will vary. The complexity with which they are categorised and the detail with which they are individually explained varies greatly.
The strategies institutions adopt for promoting attributes such as the soft skills or things like global awareness seem to fall broadly into two types: they are integrated into the curriculum or they are offered as add-ons through extra-curricular activities or optional support workshops.
The attributes model has its detractors who see this as a way of giving normative content to the aim of self-realisation; a normative content that is driven by an economic system that relies on a malleable, adaptable workforce (Moir, 2012; Chiapello & Fairclough, 2002). These are useful reminders that we need to keep referring back to the role of higher education of developing critical thinking. All suggestions and evaluations are open to multiple interpretations and rigorous interrogation and cannot be adopted in naïve isolation from social and political pressures. As we will see, owning the attributes and a continual self-questioning of one’s motivation to develop them is hugely important.
Short case study
I will describe in a short narrative the development of an attribute model at one institution. In some ways this came about as a way out of a problem. Some years before I joined the Institution there had been an overhaul of the curriculum and a generic strand introduced to all courses. This meant that for all students there was a first year module called Sector Studies and a second year module called Academic and Professional Development (APD) and the idea was that the students could all be taught together. The courses were a mix of study skills and employment focused skills. With very committed and inspirational teachers something like this could work. Unfortunately this structure was imposed on staff who resented the way their disciplinary timetable was now constrained and some did not have a clear understanding of some of the ideas behind, for example, personal development planning. By the time I joined the College there had been an element of compromise to the extent that there were ten versions of the ‘generic’ module ‘Sector Studies’. There seemed to be a continual battle between the teaching staff wanting to differentiate and do their own thing and the institution wanting a core coherence retained. Any staff efficiencies initially gained had already been lost for most courses. The remaining constraining factor was that the assessment had to be split into three pieces weighted 20, 30, 50% in order for the module registration system to have marks that would fit in the required boxes. The staff dislike of the module was evident to students who, as they often will with generic modules, simply failed to attend. In some areas of the College, for example, Design, the module had lost so much relevance to the original idea that when I did a focus group with students they were unable to explain why this particular module was called Sector Studies; the title was a mystery to them.
The focus groups were part of my remit, which was to fix this problem. The problem for me was that I didn’t think the generic strand was a good idea in the first place, and, with a history of staff and student resistance, finding ways of forcing it to work was going to be a poisoned chalice. I set up a cross-college working party to find out what was working and what the specific problems were and it was out of those discussions that we hit on the idea of using an attributes module. Students seemed to be very keen on developing employability related skills, like team working, if they were embedded in the discipline, but stopped engaging as soon as they were too generic. We re-defined as a list of attributes the skills that these modules were supposed to develop and then I, against a degree of resistance, updated the list to include more recent developments in the field of education, for example, adding: resilience, equality and diversity awareness, and environmental awareness. Once the attributes had been adopted by the college we allowed courses to drop the generic modules and replace them by embedding the attributes into their own disciplinary teaching. Thus over the last two years any new courses and any course undergoing periodic review have been replacing their Sector Studies module (and for some their APD module) with discipline specific modules, as long as they can prove, by means of a mapping document, that the attributes are embedded somewhere in the programme.
Of the two strategies mentioned earlier, embedding or supplementing, this is obviously a case of embedding. It carries the benefit of reaching all students, but also the danger of the attribute initiative being watered down so that only lip service is paid to it (Barrie, 2007; Charnock, 2013). The ways around this problem that we have used are to ensure that the attributes penetrate the programme to the level of module learning outcomes and they are reinforced by a new Learning, Teaching and Assessment Enhancement strategy. However, this my no means ensures that they are upheld in the intended form. There is a long way to go and the next stage will be to better define what we understand by each attribute, to ask what would actually count as a graduate level of any particular attribute?
One area of the college adopted a hybrid strategy of retaining a generic module but completely changing it. For these courses, where there are relatively low student numbers and some disciplinary commonality, combining the students in cognate areas increases staff efficiency and enriches the student experience. Their new module, called Developing Graduateness, has just started its first iteration and we wait to see how it is received. The module is already part of an HEA strategic development initiative on employability.
Whether we talk about attributes or being there still remains the question: how do we know we are facilitating students’ adoption of these attributes?
I am going to pick a few attributes from different universities (taken from their web pages 15.10.14) and I will obviously not pick the ones that are straightforward to assess or easily part of a traditional conception of a university education.
· Keele University, in one of its ten attributes, claims to develop, “a professional and reflective approach, including qualities of leadership, responsibility, personal integrity, empathy, care and respect for others, accountability and self-regulation.”
· Sheffield University assures us that the Sheffield graduate is, “an active citizen who respects diversity and has cultural agility to work in multinational settings.”
· Students from Cardiff Metropolitan University are instructed to, “see yourself as part of a larger community and recognise the impact that your decisions and actions have on those around you.”
· Edinburgh University graduates will be able to, “effect change and be responsive to the situations and environments in which they operate”, for example they have to, “understand social, cultural global and environmental responsibilities and issues”.
Also all the institutions I looked at, with the exception of Cardiff Metropolitan, include some form of propensity to self-reflection, such as: a reflective approach, self-evaluation and self-awareness. This is in line with pedagogical research that supports self-reflection as a way of deepening learning (Boud, 2003, 2007; Brockbank & McGill, 2007).